Negative Space

 Fractured images of countless time warps 
Pulsating out through the neon flux, 
Faded into jaded prisms of shifting shapes 
He roams, listless among the manufactured 
Bodies of happiness, inter-dimensional, transitional, 
Deriving the functions of light without a brush. 
To breach the surfaces of clarity he must analyze 
Life through all branches of the codex, 
Literary thought exhumed on his canvas, 
Aching to get out, each unique mixture,  
Bastions of the rainbow showing hidden paths. 
He must find a way, as time's keeper, 
To express the myriad forms, the bodies that moved him, 
All their possibilities etched on a rolodex reflexed, 
Sunken through vortices cast by gravity's power, 
That gyrate whirlpools of memory 
Orbiting expressions of emotion and space. 
 
Yet when he saw her in the bed, 
Deprived of energy, ill from another malady, 
The figures diminished, time collapsed, 
The colors dispersed, the prism shattered, 
All their signatures flew from the palette, 
Focusing instead on the form she possessed. 
The paint probed deep enough, 
Through contours of the leaf the lady dreamt 
In feverish whisperings of imagined sorrow, 
Translated by the artist with a tube of juniper, 
Hanging from that tree a reality transfigured. 
Possessed by her expression 
He paints all night, sick with the same disease, 
Exhaustion depleting his last reserves, 
That she might live, oh yes, his last painting 
Would help her live, immortal leaf that he gives, 
Death leaping from her bed to his.